Fiscal cliff: Lack of spine, partisanship block real solution

January 5, 2013

As is so often the case, when faced with a legitimate crisis the fiscal cliff President Obama, with the help of a complicate big media to do his damage control, a divided Congress and a partisan Senate, failed to solve the problem.

And because there were no hard decisions made regarding fundamental spending problems that are the real cause of the country $16 trillion deficit, Congress and the president will be rerunning this ugly episode in two months.

During that time, some spine needs to be developed by every elected official in Washington, but especially the president and the Democrat leaders in the Senate and House.

Truly enormous sums of money are wasted by the federal government. Merely lessening the amount flushed down the toilet that is Washington, D.C., would help ease the nation's deficit spending problem.

But there is a vast difference between how the government operates and how private businesses handle the mistakes that are made there. In the private sector, people are held accountable for sloppiness.

For instance, about $214 million has been spent on a sophisticated new security system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The system was supposed to have been in operation last summer.

But it doesn't work. The government says it will take six months and $41 million more to make the system functional.

In the private sector, someone, perhaps several people, would have been fired. There is no word of such action in reaction to the expensive government fiasco. And that is why waste is a way of life in Washington, D.C.

Someone needs to take an objective look at a spending cuts list developed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. It cuts a ton from the federal spending menu without touching major military, education, Social Security or Medicare spending;

It does so by using common sense to determine what the federal government can afford to spend its money on. Until the president and others living in Big Government Dreamland start to address spending realities, there will be more repeats of this fiscal cliff embarrassment.